Book Talks

Book Talks 2023 - 2024

Book Talks are designed to give UM faculty with a humanities focus an opportunity to share their recently published books with the community. Faculty generally present on their research and take questions from the audience.   

Please join us for another academic year @ Books & Books! (265 Aragon Ave, Coral Gables, FL 33134) Please RSVP for the program to allow for set-up. Programs take place on Monday evenings, starting at 6:30pm.

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  • Monday, August 28: Andrew Lynch

     

    Monday, August 28 @ 6:30pm

    Book Talk @ Books & Books, Coral Gables

    Spanish in Miami: Sociolinguistic Dimensions of Postmodernity

    Andrew Lynch, Associate Dean for Program Development, College of Arts & Sciences; Professor, Michele Bowman Underwood Department of Modern Languages & Literatures; Editor in Chief, Heritage Language Journal

    Spanish in Miami reveals the multifaceted ways in which the language is ideologically rescaled and sociolinguistically reconfigured in this global city.

    This book approaches Miami’s sociolinguistic situation from language ideological and critical cultural perspectives, combining extensive survey data with two decades of observations, interviews, and conversations with Spanish speakers from all sectors of the city. Tracing the advent of postmodernity in sociolinguistic terms, separate chapters analyze the changing ideological representation of Spanish in mass media during the late 20th century, its paradoxical (dis)continuity in the city’s social life, the political and economic dimensions of the Miami/Havana divide, the boundaries of language through the perceptual lens of Anglicisms, and the potential of South Florida—as part of the Caribbean—to inform our understanding of the highly complex present and future of Spanish in the United States.

    Spanish in Miami will be of interest to advanced students and researchers of Spanish, Sociolinguistics, and Latino Studies.

     to register!

     

  • Monday, September 18: Ashli White

    Monday, September 18 @ 6:30pm

    Book Talk @ Books & Books, Coral Gables

    Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and Politics in the Late Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

    Ashli White, Professor and Chair, Department of History

    Join us to celebrate this new book by Ashli White, Professor and Chair, Department of History. 

    Focusing on a range of objects—ceramics and furniture, garments and accessories, prints, maps, and public amusements—White shows how material culture held political meaning for diverse populations. Enslaved and free, women and men, poor and elite—all turned to things as a means to realize their varied and sometimes competing visions of revolutionary change.

    “By excavating the power of material objects and visual images to express the fervor and fear of the revolutionary era, Ashli White brings us closer to more fully embodied, more fully human, figures.”—Richard Rabinowitz, author of Objects of Love and Regret: A Brooklyn Story
     
    “In this important, innovative book, Ashli White moves nimbly between North America, Europe, and the Caribbean to capture the richness and complexity of material culture in the Age of Revolutions.”—Michael Kwass, Johns Hopkins University.

    Ashli White is Professor of History at the University of Miami, where she specializes in the history of early North America and its ties to the Atlantic world. Her new book, Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and Politics in the Late Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, was published by Yale University Press in 2023, and she is also the author of Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Johns Hopkins, 2010). In 2018, she was the associate curator and co-author of the catalog for Antillean Visions, an exhibition at the Lowe Art Museum that explored over 500 years of Caribbean maps.​​​​​​

     to register. Please confirm your attendance in advance to enable sufficient set-up for the program. We look forward to seeing you!

  • Monday, October 2: Delia Pamela Fuentes Korban

    Monday, October 2 @ 6:30pm

    Book Talk @ Books & Books, Coral Gables

    Memory and History in Argentine Popular Music

    Delia Pamela Fuentes Korban, Lecturer, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures

    Join us to celebrate this book by Delia Pamela Fuentes Korban, Lecturer, Modern Languages and Literatures: Memory and History in Argentine Popular Music.

    Memory and History in Argentine Popular Music examines Argentine popular music of the 1990s and early 2000s that denounced, immortalized, and reflected on the processes that led to the socioeconomic crisis that shook Argentine society at the end of 2001. It draws upon the three most popular genres of the time—tango, rock chabón, and cumbia villera, a form of cumbia from the shantytowns. The book analyzes lyrics from these three genres, detailing how they capture the feel of daily life and the changes that occurred under the neoliberal economic model that ravaged the country throughout the ‘90s. The contention is that these are canciones con historia, songs that depict historical events and tell personal stories. Therefore, the lyrics from all three genres serve as accounts of historical events and social and economic changes, denouncing the social inequalities caused by neoliberal economic policies. Furthermore, the book explores how the process of remembering and forgetting takes place on the Internet. It examines how users navigate video-sharing portals and use music to create “virtual sites of memory,” a term that extends Winter’s conception of physical sites of memory to digital environments as virtual sites of commemoration.

    Delia Pamela Fuentes Korban is in the Michele Bowman Underwood Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami, where she teaches Italian and Spanish Languages as well as Latin American literature. She specializes in memory studies and in contemporary Argentine literature, history, and popular music.

     to register. Please confirm your attendance in advance to enable sufficient set-up for the program. We look forward to seeing you!

     

  • Monday, October 30: Max Fraser

    Monday, October 30 @ 6:30pm

    Book Talk @ Books & Books

    Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class

    Max Fraser, Assistant Professor, Department of History

    Join us to celebrate this recent book, Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class, by Max Fraser, Assistant Professor, Department of History.
    Hillbilly Highway presents the largely untold story of the great migration of white southerners to the industrial Midwest and its profound and enduring political and social consequences.
    Over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, as many as eight million whites left the economically depressed southern countryside and migrated to the booming factory towns and cities of the industrial Midwest in search of work. The “hillbilly highway” was one of the largest internal relocations of poor and working people in American history, yet it has largely escaped close study by historians. In Hillbilly Highway, Max Fraser recovers the long-overlooked story of this massive demographic event and reveals how it has profoundly influenced American history and culture—from the modern industrial labor movement and the postwar urban crisis to the rise of today’s white working-class conservatives.

    The book draws on a diverse range of sources—from government reports, industry archives, and union records to novels, memoirs, oral histories, and country music—to narrate the distinctive class experience that unfolded across the Transappalachian migration during these critical decades. As the migration became a terrain of both social advancement and marginalization, it knit together white working-class communities across the Upper South and the Midwest—bringing into being a new cultural region that remains a contested battleground in American politics to the present.
    The compelling story of an important and neglected chapter in American history, Hillbilly Highway upends conventional wisdom about the enduring political and cultural consequences of the great migration of white southerners in the twentieth century.


    Max Fraser is a scholar of American labor, cultural, and political history. His research and teaching focus primarily on working class life and social movements in the twentieth century; on the rise of new strains of political conservatism in the decades after World War II; and on the class politics of American popular culture. He is now beginning research on a second major project, on the figure of the outlaw in American politics and culture. His scholarship has been published in journals such as American Art, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, Raritan, and Southern Cultures, and he writes a regular column on big business and American politics for New Labor Forum. He has also worked as a journalist, reporting on the labor movement and the economy for a range of publications including Dissent and The Nation.

     to register. Please confirm your attendance in advance to enable sufficient set-up for the program. We look forward to seeing you!

  • Monday, November 13: Simon Envine

    Monday, November 13 @ 6:30pm

    Book Talk @ Books & Books

    Simon Evnine, Professor, Department of Philosophy

  • Thursday, January 18: Pat Saunders

    Thursday, January 18, [Time TBD]

    Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) / 1103 Biscayne Blvd., Miami, FL 33132

    Pat Saunders, Associate Professor of English

  • Monday, February 19: Hermann Beck

    Monday, February 19 @ 6:30pm

    Book Talk @ Books & Books

    Hermann Beck, Professor of History

  • Monday, March 25: Alfred Martin

    Monday, March 25 @ 6:30pm

    Book Talk @ Books & Books

    Alfred L Martin, Associate Professor, School of Communication

  • Monday, April 3: Jennifer Ferriss-Hill

    Monday, April 3 @ 6:30pm

    Book Talk @ Books & Books

    Jennifer Ferris-Hill, Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and College Diversity, College of Arts and Sciences; Professor of Classics